Wednesday

Jun.
5, 2002

I am a hunchback

WEDNESDAY, 5 JUNE 2002Listen
(RealAudio) | How to listenPoem: "I
am a hunchback," by Robert Louis Stevenson.

I am a hunchback

I am a hunchback, yellow faced,
A hateful sight to see,
'Tis all that other men can do
To pass and let me be.

I am a woman, my hair is white,
I was a darkhaired lass;
The gin dances in my head,
I stumble as I pass.

I am a man that God made at first,
And teachers tried to harm,
Here! hunchback take my friendly hand,
Good woman, take my arm.

It's the dayAdam Smithwas baptized in Kirkeldy, Scotland (1723). The exact date
of his birth is not known. When he was a small child he was stolen by gypsies,
but he was soon found and returned to his parents. He published only two books
in his lifetime: The Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759) and The Wealth
of Nations (1776), which said that market forces were better at creating
social good than any government program.

It's the birthday of Ivy
Compton-Burnett, born in Pinner, England (1884). Her father had seven
children by his first wife, and when she died, seven children by his second;
Compton-Burnett was the oldest child of the second wife. Her father deposited
this enormous family in an isolated house on the coast, and returned to his
practice in London. The tyranny and caprice of her mother, and the unexpected
deaths, one after the other, of her beloved father and four of her siblings,
provided Compton-Burnett with the material for many of her early novels. She
wrote about the tyranny and repression that lay behind the prim decorum of Victorian
families. She didn't publish her first book, Pastors and Masters, until
after she was forty, in 1925. Readers raved about the effect created by her
steely, ironic writing. "It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing
else in the world," said one reviewer. During the Second World War she
began to be more widely read as public sentiment caught up with her moral disenchantment.

It's the birthday of Federico
Garcia Lorca, born in Fuente Vaqueros, Spain (1898). He wrote poems,
but resisted publishing them; he thought poetry should be spoken. He did publish,
though; his collection Gypsy Ballads (1928) combined twentieth-century
surrealism with the old, dark legends of Andalusia, and he became famous all
over Spain. He single-handedly revived Spanish theatre, and is remembered now
for three tragedies, Blood Wedding (1935), Yerma, (1937) and The
House of Bernarda Alba (1940). In the first month of the Spanish Civil War
he was dragged into an open field and shot by a firing squad.

It's the birthday of Richard
Scarry, born in Boston (1919). He's the author of more than three hundred
books for children. He said that what made him happiest as an author was receiving
letters from people telling him that their copies of his books were all worn
out, or were held together with Scotch tape.

It's the birthday of Margaret
Drabble, born in Sheffield, Yorkshire (1939). She won great admiration
when she was younger for novels about women flouting social convention, like
The Garrick Year (1964), and The Millstone (1965). Her books have
also been described as the best books to read for people who wonder what's it's
like to be English. Drabble's half-sister is the British novelist A.S. Byatt.
Last year Drabble edited the Oxford Companion to English Literature,
and inserted, among its thousands of biographical entries, a single, entirely
mythical one.

It's the birthday of David
Hare, born in Sussex (1947). Since his debut in 1969, he's written twenty-two
plays. In 1998, he had four plays running simultaneously in four different New
York City theatres. When Frank Rich panned one of his plays in 1998 and the
production closed immediately afterward, Hare wrote an essay for the New
York Times that said Rich had too much power. Rich backpeddled somewhat
in a reply, and Hare was judged to have landed a blow to the critic's formidable
reputation.

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